The simple, but disappointing, answer is that we cannot break down systemic racism within the judicial system until we have made significant inroads in eroding white supremacy itself.
White supremacy is defined as an ideology based on the belief that whites are superior to other races and is manifested through systems that maintain whites in superior positions.
The most cutting-edge research on implicit bias, including research conducted by Harvard’s Project Implicit, confirms that most Americans associate Blacks with crime and violence. Until fairly recently, these beliefs were held consciously and articulated publicly. Today, these beliefs are largely unconscious, but nevertheless play a significant role in decision-making processes. Accordingly, when actors within the criminal justice system make decisions, they act on these biases — even if they are not aware of them.
Bias in the criminal justice system begins with police officers; they decide who to stop and frisk or to arrest. Study after study demonstrates that police officers bring Blacks into the system with far greater frequency than whites. The process continues with prosecutors deciding whether to charge those arrested, take them to trial, or urge them to enter guilty pleas. Again, fewer whites are charged, compelled to enter guilty pleas, or sent to trial. At conviction, judges decide punishments. Blacks routinely receive harsher punishments than whites, up to and including the death penalty. Before judges can hand down sentences, juries must determine guilt or innocence. Juries convict black defendants at higher rates than white defendants.
A seemingly straightforward way of handling this problem of discretion is to eliminate it by crafting strict guidelines about what to do at each stage of the process. This has been tried since the 1970s and has failed, or has produced horrific unintended consequences. For example, mandatory-minimum sentencing was designed to ensure that all criminals convicted of particular crimes would receive similar punishments. That reform is responsible for today’s mass incarceration crisis.
In sum, we cannot make progress within the criminal justice system until we deal with white supremacy in our society as a whole. And the first step in that process is acknowledging that it is a problem, something we have been loathe to do.
Glenn McNair is a professor of history at Kenyon and former police officer and special agent within the U.S. Treasury Department.
When teaching “The Politics of the Bathroom,” my students and I realized that nearly every social justice movement of the century has involved bathrooms.
Jim Crow laws and apartheid dictated separate bathrooms for whites and non-whites. Women’s liberation also fueled debate over bathrooms. Feminists coined the term “potty parity” to protest inequalities in the distribution of restroom facilities (restrooms for female senators were not provided in the U.S. Senate until 1992), while opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment argued that its passage would spell an end to separate bathrooms for men and women. Disability activists fought to make bathrooms accessible for individuals with physical handicaps.
Today, nothing is more symbolic of transgender politics in the U.S. than bathrooms. For a transgender individual, every trip to the bathroom is accompanied by anxiety and dread, so much so that many simply avoid public restrooms altogether, often risking their health. If transgender individuals cannot use public facilities, they cannot participate fully in public life. They cannot be regular consumers — or citizens.
Public bathrooms both reflect and construct sexual dimorphism, our sense that nature produces bodies of only two kinds. Those supporting “bathroom bills” — the legislation of separate bathroom facilities for men and women in public buildings — see sex as fixed and immutable. For supporters of transgender rights, the biology of sex is not so cut and dried: Genes, anatomy and hormones do not always line up neatly on one side or the other of an absolute divide. The concept of “gender” attempts to recognize that life can’t be defined in simple either/or terms; it’s a more complex, messier project.
Ultimately, public restrooms create social anxieties because they are spaces in which the public and private collide in the most intimate ways. While the need to eliminate unites us all, the design and distribution of bathrooms carve space according to social hierarchies of gender, race, class and ability, making the toilet a historic symbol of public debate